Van Halen

"Somebody Get Me a Doctor" is the song that made me really consider exploring the Van Halen oeuvre Worried that post-I records would be filled with... filler, I checked out some album tracks on YouTube. Nope, the album tracks rocked too-- Case in point this balls-out rocker about how difficult it is to maneuver through a crowded bar when you have a hard-on in your pants.
http://johnporcellino.blogspot.com/2013/01/favorite-albums-of-2012.html

Ted Falconi wrote:
The very educational "Van Halen Interviews" series explains that they were somehow one million dollars in debt to Warner Bros. and needed to make something new for them to sell. So they recorded II in a hurry and got back on tour asap.

Zep did it with “D’Yer Make ‘er?” The Stooges did it with “We Will Fall”. Kiss did it with “Beth”. And Van Halen did it with “Ice Cream Man”. That is, they stepped outside their own self-imposed boundaries and brutalised their own metaphor. Of course, Queen did it so often they transcended every genre and got what they deserved/demanded – played Sun City with Ben Elton. But the point here is that the success of the best Van Halen records is all alchemical, that is: they only failed when they stepped outside the metaphor. So long as the songs contained the pre-determined codes – off kilter riffs, unmelodic chromatic strato-guitar solo, showmanic look-at-me vocals, and faultline punishing ur-bass – Van Halen COULD NOT fail. If they had a problem at all, it was just that they had two Shamen in one group and both shamen were showmen. For, as K. Rasmussen long ago asserted in his 1932 book INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OF THE IGLUILIK ESKIMOS:
“Every great shaman must, when asked and when a number of people are present, exercise his art in miraculous fashion in order to astonish the people and convince them of the sacred and inexplicable powers of the shaman.”
I ask you if it’s just me, or was the brevity of the first four Van Halen LPs (about 16 minutes per side) for some deeper shamanic reason? Were they displays rather than entertainments, in the same manner that the Jesus & Mary Chain’s early ‘shows’ were really displays, thereby setting them beyond judgement by being only 15 minutes in length. Did [Warners in-house producer] Ted Templeman get to produce them because he was their Mr Bollocks, or was it because his name stated that he was a temple-man? I mean, this sucker weren’t no rawk guy, he’d even done Beefheart’s soul LP CLEAR SPOT. And did Ted get credited as ‘Tad’ Templeman on the label of FAIR WARNING because of some band in-joke that his production technique was (perhaps in some very ancient Keltic manner) turning him into the tad, or father, of the group?


Typically, like the traditionalists they obviously were, the bootleggers spent all their money on a good-looking record label and left us with your typical Hallmark of Quality photo-copy outer sleeve
I ask these questions because reading David Lee Roth’s autobiography CRAZY FROM THE HEAT back in 1999CE surprised me at the sheer depth of mystical understanding that he had brought to a supposedly intuitive rock muse. He wrote about getting down on his hands and knees and scrubbing every arena stage before a show, just so he’d have a direct relationship with the wood on which he danced.

Now what we need is a whole bunch of poorly recorded concerts from the WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST and FAIR WARNING period, preferably with vocals way loud and guitar to the Moon. Dammit, we need a Rallizes Denudes-style 10CD box with 23 versions of “On Fire” and an Arc-ified multimelded 25-minute “Eruption”.

Paves wrote:np:

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http://www.mediafire.com/?6xb98i5nsvfci27

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http://www.mediafire.com/?rwobame2wwj5r4o